Veritas Sutures Backup Tools

Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) has added more padding around its flagship backup and recovery software products, with an application intended to let IT organizations provide data protection as a service and another designed to help customers achieve regulatory compliance (see Veritas Upgrades Backup Suite).

Veritas is positioning its new CommandCentral Service 3.5 software as a way to let IT organizations create a "utility computing" model and deliver backup and recovery as a service to their end users. The software integrates with Veritas's NetBackup and Backup Exec products to discover backup and recovery jobs and other events information, and it is able to monitor service levels across various applications, locations, and business units.

The enhancements come at an especially critical time for Veritas, which is hearing the footsteps of perhaps its most serious competitor to date in the storage software market: EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), which recently completed its acquisition of Legato Systems (see EMC Gobbles Legato and EMC Closes Legato Acquisition).

Ever since EMC announced its plans to buy Legato, Veritas has conspicuously mentioned its wins of former Legato customers, noting that in recent months it has converted companies including BAE Systems; the City of Santa Clara, Calif.; Kodak; the State of Nevada; Usinternetworking; and York University.

However, EMC and Legato see it as a sign that Veritas is sweating. "We just find it interesting that Veritas is so enamored with us now, when just a few months ago they wouldn't mention us as competitors," says Legato spokesman Todd Cadley, who points out that Legato's revenues in the past four quarters have accelerated faster than Veritas's.Cadley adds that EMC and Legato are themselves "approaching 100 Veritas replacements -- and with everything EMC brings to the table, we expect that trend to play to our favor moving forward." [Ed. note: As opposed to "moving backward."]

In any case, Veritas is hoping its new offerings put a bit of distance between itself and the EMC/Legato tag-team.

CommandCentral Service goes beyond Veritas's Global Data Manager, which the company launched in March (see Veritas Ties Backup Together). That product allowed administrators, for the first time, a view of data protection processes in both Backup Exec and NetBackup from a single central console.

Also today, Veritas introduced Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0, designed to handle email and file archiving for Microsoft Exchange and NTFS, the Windows NT file system. Legato offers similar archiving tools, called ApplicationXtender and EmailXtender, which it picked up with its acquisition of OTG Software last year (see Legato Ropes In OTG).

In addition, Veritas announced NetBackup 5.0, which provides disk-based backup features and desktop and laptop data protection capabilities (see Veritas Vacuums Desktop Data). New in version 5.0 is what Veritas calls "synthetic backup," which shortens restore times by merging small backups. NetBackup 5.0 also now supports a wide variety of low-cost, mid-range, and high-end disk hardware platforms to enable faster backups and instant recovery from disk, including systems from Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), LSI Logic Storage Systems Inc., Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP), and Nexsan Technologies.CommandCentral Service 3.5, available now, is priced starting at $22,000. NetBackup 5.0, priced starting at $5,000, is slated to ship next month.

Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch